Trudy Rubin’s Worldview column runs on Thursdays and Sundays. Over the past decade she has made multiple trips to Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, Israel and the West Bank and also written from Syria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, South Korea and China. She is the author of Willful Blindness: the Bush Administration and Iraq, a book of her columns from 2002-2004. In 2001 she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary and in 2008 she was awarded the Edward Weintal prize for international reporting. In 2010 she won the Arthur Ross award for international commentary from the Academy of American Diplomacy.

In 2009, I spent an afternoon talking with Malala Yousafzai's father, Ziauddin, in an outdoor garden in Mingora, the capital of the Swat district of Pakistan, which had just been freed from months of Taliban control.

The Nobel committee finally got the Peace Prize right in 2014.
After blowing the chance to choose Malala Yousafzai last year - as a brave and inspiring champion of girls' education worldwide - the committee finally tapped her, along with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian campaigner against child labor.

The Syrian Kurdish leader's voice on the telephone on Monday sounded desperate.
He told me ISIS is on the verge of defeating Syrian Kurds, who have been fighting fiercely for weeks to defend the town of Kobani near the Turkish border.

Once again, as we have seen so frequently and so recently in many countries, massive crowds of young people are demonstrating for democracy against a repressive government. This time the civic protests are ongoing in downtown Hong Kong.

At the United Nations General Assembly Wednesday, President Obama challenged world leaders to join together "to reject the cancer of violent extremism." I believe his speech will be remembered as one of the most important of his career.